


Upon a Midnight Clear

by Nos4a2no9



Category: Wilby Wonderful (2004)
Genre: Christmas Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-05-05
Updated: 2007-05-05
Packaged: 2018-04-24 01:04:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4899586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nos4a2no9/pseuds/Nos4a2no9
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's Christmas in Wilby, and Duck has a reason to celebrate. Semi-prequel to "Quiet in Drowning," my longer Wilby fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Upon a Midnight Clear

**Author's Note:**

> This story has been sitting on my hard drive since last Christmas. kalpurna was going through a really rough time and wanted some Duck/Dan schmoop, I wrote this and then got embarrassed and hid it away in a drawer for eight months. So...it's Christmas in May, folks! Many thanks to the wonderful llassah and dessert_first for their fantastic beta work. As always, I am spoiled by my brilliant, insightful and patient betas.

Duck McDonald wasn’t the sort to pay much attention to Christmas.

He did know when the holidays were rolling around. It was hard to miss, especially when all the window displays and billboards and TV ads set out to make sure he wouldn’t forget how many shopping days he had left until the main event. But Duck figured Christmas was a time for kids and people with families. The holidays didn’t make much sense when it was just him, and so he’d never really bothered.

But when it wasn’t just him..well, he’d tried. 

He’d met Mike in the summer, in some trashy place filled with aging hustlers and a two-drink minimum. Which Duck had no problem meeting at all, not in those days. Mike was a good-looking guy, a little beefy in the way that ran to muscle instead of fat. He had thick dark hair that Duck liked to bury his fingers in, and dark eyes that looked almost black when he was about to come. They’d been sleeping together for about four months, off and on, when December rolled around. Duck knew it wasn’t love, but it was the longest relationship he’d ever had, and the Christmas thing seemed like something he ought to try.

And so Duck had found himself at the Eaton Centre on December 21st buying a set of gloves for Mike. They weren’t anything special – black leather lined with some kind of insulate – but he’d never actually bought a present for anyone as an adult. The gifts he’d given his mum before she died were kid stuff, things he’d made in shop class. This was important. The salesgirl at the Bay seemed to sense how nervous he was and took pity on him, helping him decide on Mike’s gloves. She even offered to wrap them up but Duck just shook his head. Then he went out and bought wrapping paper and a bright red cellophane bow and a card with a picture of a Christmas tree on it.

“Happy Holidays,” the card said. Beneath it Duck wrote, “Keep your hands warm. Merry Christmas.”

He kept the wrapped present at the bottom of his closet under a stack of old canvases. The days passed – the 22nd, the 23rd – and Duck discovered that he wasn’t going to chicken out. He still wanted to give Mike the gloves. And when Mike just before Christmas, Duck sat beside him on the couch, chewing on a slice of pizza and doing shot after shot of liquid courage. He was waiting for the right moment.

He knew they’d finish the pizza, watch the rest of _White Christmas_ , and then Mike would settle back and unhook the top button of his jeans. They never said much to each other -- Duck wasn’t really sure why that was -- but they had a routine. And after Duck had sucked Mike off, Mike would usually reciprocate. That’s what made it a relationship, he figured. That, and the pizza. 

So just as Mike leaned back, but before his thick fingers made it to the button, Duck felt around under the couch cushions and pulled out the slim, carefully-wrapped present and the card. He handed them wordlessly to Mike, feeling the tips of his ears start to burn. He couldn’t meet Mike’s dark, dark eyes. 

Duck wasn’t sure how long he held out the present, waiting for Mike to take the gift. Seconds, probably, but it felt like hours. At last he looked up, his arm still awkwardly extended, and saw that Mike looked shocked and pissed off and uncomfortable. 

“What the hell is this?”

Duck slowly lowered his arm. “Christmas.”

“Fuck,” Mike muttered, standing. He went right to the hall closet and started pulling on his coat. “You fucking moron. I’m married.”

The sound of the door slamming shut seemed to echo for a long, long time.

Afterwards Duck finished the rest of his beer and Mike’s beer and then five more, and then he did a couple shots of whiskey just to be sure. And then he headed out, back to the shitty bar where he’d first met Mike. He blew a guy in the bathroom, and then let a different guy fuck him in the alley behind the bar. 

He threw away the gloves and burned the wrapping paper and that stupid goddamn card.

He paid even less attention to Christmas after that. It became just another day on the calendar, like Memorial Day or Arbor Day or Winter Solstice (whatever that was). He stopped drinking and moved back to Wilby Island and the sex stuff...well, there was the Watch and a couple of clubs in Halifax, but it wasn’t like it had been in Toronto. He kept seeing the same guys around town, even though most times they wouldn’t meet his eyes.

But he started noticing Christmas again, mostly in the way people stopped him in the streets and said, “Happy holidays!” People he’d fixed broken storm doors for, people whose evestroughs he’d mucked out, all gave him cards and cash and little presents. Old women on the island who remembered his mother sent him fragrant-smelling tins of baked goods. He still didn’t do much to observe the holiday, but for the first time since he was a kid Duck felt like he was missing out. 

And then...and then there was Dan, and nothing was the same anymore.

He’d met Dan in the summer, too. Not at the Watch – they’d seen each other there but had never managed to do more than exchange a few brief nods on their way into or out of the woods – but later. Dan came home from the hospital with Duck, and never left.

Dan slept on the couch those first couple of months, long legs drawn up awkwardly and covered by an old afghan Duck’s mother had made. And they talked, which seemed to be a new experience for them both. They talked as they made dinner (simple stuff like chili and stir-fry but better, much better, than pizza) and they talked as they watched old Westerns and war movies. They talked until the sun turned the sky pink. Duck couldn’t remember ever saying so much to another person before. He told Dan about how miserable high school was and about his mom dying and about Toronto and the drinking and about all those alleyways. And about Mike, although Duck left out the pathetic story about the gloves.

And Dan told him about Vancouver Island and being married (“It felt exactly like being alone, just with another person there”) and what it had felt like to die.

After all the talking they tried being quiet together, and that was...that was good, too.

They watched a lot of sunrises.

Duck didn’t kiss Dan until they’d been living together almost a month. Fall had come to the island by then and they started taking long walks to check out the fiery red-gold that had descended like a blanket over Wilby’s forests. Duck and Dan walked slowly together in the forest, and every time Dan’s shoulder brushed his own Duck felt an ache deep in the pit of his stomach. It wasn’t the sad, lonely ache he’d known for so many years, or the embarrassed one he felt when he thought about Mike. This was a good ache, good like their silences and their conversations. Good like their sunrises.

Duck came to a stop in the middle of the path, his fingers tingling a little in the chilly autumn air. The tip of Dan’s nose was red and his cheeks were flushed from the walking. He seemed so happy standing there in the quiet forest, happier and more open and more awake than Duck had ever seen him look, except maybe when he looked at Duck. So Duck leaned in to kiss him.

Dan’s lips were warm and soft. He smelled like Duck’s soap and Duck’s shampoo and a little like fall in the forest, the spicy-sweet scent of decay underneath it all. Duck grinned and deepened the kiss, feeling Dan’s hands come up to touch his cheek lightly. His fingers were cold.

Before the first snows fell on Wilby Island and the sea turned gray and dark, Dan and Duck became lovers.

It was different than Duck had expected, different in wonderful ways. Having someone to wake up next to in his narrow childhood bed was strange. Duck thought of taking over the bedroom that had belonged to his parents and maybe buying a double bed, but Dan had insisted, in his quiet way, that they stay in Duck’s old room. Dan had said, blushing and stammering, that he liked sleeping so close together. The explanation was almost apologetic until Duck said that he felt the same way. 

“Besides,” he’d added, “We’re both skinny bastards. Guess we can squeeze in and not cut off circulation to anything important.”

That had made Dan smile one of his brief, all-too-rare smiles, and Duck’s heart had done a kind of backflip. This was good.

The good feeling got better by early December. It was cold enough by then to light a fire in the living room hearth every night. Duck would get home from his usual piecemeal winter work – shoveling snow, putting chains on the tires of the island’s few two-wheel-drive cars, fixing and weather-stripping doors and windows – to a warm fire and Dan, luminous in the flickering light. On those December nights Duck couldn’t wait to touch Dan. He would reach for his face, his neck, some bit of exposed skin on his stomach, or his back where his sweater rode up. And they would be lost in each other for a while. Afterwards they would lie on the floor, comfortable in a warm nest of old quilts and blankets raided from his mother’s musty-smelling linen cupboard, and watch the warm crackle of burning logs in the fireplace. Duck thought the whole thing might be better than a sunrise.

It was on just such a night, Dan leaning back comfortably on Duck’s chest, when Duck first dared to talk about the upcoming holidays. It helped that he couldn’t see Dan’s face when he made the attempt.

“So, do you want to do anything?” he asked, half-expecting Dan to stutter an explanation about family commitments out West or say that he didn’t do the whole Christmas thing. But Dan simply sighed and shifted closer into Duck. 

“Yeah, I do.”

Duck decided to get Dan a pair of gloves for Christmas.


End file.
